PPC Myths:

1. PPC ads will help organic rankings
2. PPC ads will hurt organic rankings

Tag Myths:

1. you must have a keyword-rich domain
2. you must have keyword-rich page URLs
3. heading tags are necessary (H1, H2 etc.)
4. using keywords in comment tags will hurt your rankings.
5. you need to use keywords in meta keyword tags, in particular you need to use keywords that are included in your page content.

Note: It's actually better to use the keyword tag to include misspellings and other keyword varieties that you don't have in your pages.

Content Myths:

1. page copy must be a certain # of words(there is really no set limit to please search engines.)
2. that you need to bold/italicize your target keywords
3. that you must use a specific keyword density.(keyword density tools are ridiculous.)
4. that you must optimize a page for a single keyword or phrase per page. Instead, try to optimize each page for 3-5 phrases that are related, so that your copy reads better than repeating one phrase over and over.
5. that you need to optimize for the long-tail searches. You don't generally need to optimize for these - engines will find them on their own.
6. duplicate content will get your site penalized. There is not a penalty as such, but engines will filter out duplicates in lieu of the original copy (or what they think is the original).

Design Myths:

1. your HTML code must validate to W3C. Not even Google.com validates!
2. your navigation must be text links not images. Surprisingly,graphical navigation is fine as long as you use ALT tags.
3. you can't use Flash. It's fine to use Flash, as long as it is one element of your page, not a complete Flash site. Use a text-based site too if using a Flash site.
4. certain design techniques are black hat. Javascript code is legitimate, not just used by black hats.

Link Building Myths:

1. that Google's link: command is accurate. It's not a useful tool. Use Google Webmaster Tools or the Yahoo link command instead.
2. that reciprocal links won't count. From the right site,reciprocal links are fine, even very helpful.
3. that pages are ranked in PageRank order in the search results. They're not. Google Toolbar PageRank is not accurate anyway so ignore it.
4. you must be in DMOZ or Yahoo Directory to get good Google rankings. In my opinion, the Yahoo Directory is not worth the money these days.

Submitting, Crawling and Indexing Myths:

1. that you need to submit URLs to engines. Provided you have a link to your site, you will be found and indexed.
2. that you need a Google Sitemap. Not needed for the average site. It won't change your site rank.
3. that you need to update your site frequently.
4. frequent spidering helps rankings. Not true.
5. that you need multiple sites. This won't help in the engines and creates more maintenance work.
6. that you need doorway pages. this is so 1995!

SEO Company Myths:

1. that a #1 ranking will always lead to more traffic or sales. The good rankings need to be for keywords and phrases that people are actually searching for.
2. that the company can place pages in certain positions. Not possible, unless they’re using Pay Per Click or sponsored spots.
3. that your rankings will tank if you stop paying the company. Rubbish!
4. that they have a "proprietary method" of SEO. They’relying!
5. that they have a "special relationship" with Google. Again, they're lying. Google has no relationships with organic SEO companies that I am aware of.
6. that they can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work. Run away!

My definition of SEO is "making your site the best it can be for your site visitors AND the search engines". Search engines need to:

1. Find
2. Crawl
3. Index
4. Determine relevancy
5. show results

So you should keep these top of mind when designing and SEOing your site. Search engines don't know you. So you should disclose what you sell and who you are in plain language that naturally incorporates the keyword phrases. Dumb down your pages for users. What search engines want is good content. If you're not getting good traffic from your pages, they're broken. In a nutshell, make sure your pages speak to your target audience and solve their problems.

How to choose keywords to target on your site.

I recommended brainstorming with friends, family and business colleagues and creating a seed list of keywords. Then take that list and run it through keyword research tools such as WordTracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/) or Keyword Discovery (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/) and even Google AdWords (http://adwords.google.com/) Or Web CEO (Free) to determine the best keywords and phrases to target.

Three types of keyword phrases:

1. General and highly competitive terms - not good choices.
2. Long tail - uncompetitive terms - generally no need to SEO for.
3. Relevant and specific terms, which are the best to choose because they highly searched, yet are targeted enough to bring qualified traffic.

Where to put your Keyword

1. anchor text
2. clickable image alt attributes (alt tags)
3. headlines
4. body text copy
5. title tags (Don't make your titles less than 10 words.)
6. meta description tags

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list of some of the more popular spider commands and instances in which you might want to use them.

<meta name="robots" content="index">

This meta command is one of the most common ones used – and it is also the least necessary. It tells search engine spiders to come on in and put the page in their index. However, all search engines do this by default anyway. Basically, if you want to put it in there for fun, be my guest, but this command is not giving you any special treatment. All search engines are going to index your page, unless you specifically tell them otherwise.

<meta name="robots" content="follow">

The follow command is different from the index command. It basically requests that the search engine spiders follow the links that are on a particular page. Again, however, this piece of code is completely unnecessary because all search engines are going to follow the links on a page, unless otherwise directed.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

The noindex command, the opposite of the index command, tells search engine spiders not to index the content of a page. It's important to note however that search engine spiders will still follow the links on a page that uses only this command.

When not used for legitimate purposes, this tag can be dangerous because it can put you at risk for penalization by most, if not all search engines. This is because you can use a noindex tag to hide pages with multiple links that you don't want visitors to see but that you do want all search engines to index.

There are however some legitimate uses for the noindex command. For example, if you have a dynamic site and you've created static pages to replace some of your dynamic pages, which can make them easier for search engine spiders to access, you could put a noindex tag on the dynamic version.

As Google mentions in its Webmaster Help Center:

"Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34431). Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages." In cases like these, it is acceptable to use the "no index" command on the dynamic version of the page, so that your content will not be treated as duplicate. You are not tricking all search engines, you're just redirecting them.

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">

This tag tells search engine spiders that it's OK to go ahead and index a page and list it but that they shouldn't follow any of the links that are on the page. This can be useful if, for example, you had some partners that requested a link on your site that you felt obligated to give, but you wanted to hold onto as much Page Rank as possible. Now this is of course between you and your own personal god, but you would be able to in effect have a partners page, add the nofollow attribute to the meta tags, and basically not pass on any of your Page Rank to any of the sites to which you are linking. The nofollow command in effect tells all search engines that this is the end of the line.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

Obviously, noindex and nofollow are powerful tags – and in combination, they can make a page and the subsequent pages to which it links invisible to nearly all search engines. This combination command tells search engine spiders, "Do not read this page; do not follow any of the links on this page; do not include this page in your index."

This command has its beneficial uses. For example, it can be placed on pages on a site that have duplicate content for legitimate reasons. A website might have both a page for the United States and a page for England that cover the same product with exactly the same content. However, nearly all search engines would see this as duplicate content and could devalue both pages. So placing this command on one of them means that search engine spiders will walk on by and you won't be penalized.

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

Finally, almost all search engines today, including Google and Yahoo, offer a cached version of a site alongside its listing that provides a snapshot of what the page used to look like. The noarchive tag, therefore, is available to be used in circumstances where there is content on your website that is of a timely nature and therefore that you might not necessarily want search engine spiders to cache for people to have access to moving forward.

For example, a business might run a one-time special that has a ridiculously low price to drum up some business while things are slow. The business will want to be able to shut that sale down as soon as sales are back up to a solid level. However, it is conceivable that someone could click on the cached version of the business's site, see the old deal that was out there, and insist on getting it for themselves. By using the noarchive tag, you are telling search engine spiders, in effect, "This page is subject to frequent changes, and I don't want my visitors to have access to some of this content at a later time."

Conclusion

The commands discussed above are just a few of the ones in existence, and new ones are being added frequently. While nearly all search engines support these commands, there are still some that don't. The ones in this article, however, are fairly universally understood by search engine spiders, no matter from where they originate. As more universal commands are introduced, I will write about them in future articles.

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Here is a list of what I consider to be the Top 10 dumbest web site decisions ever, in reverse order, David Letterman style :

10) Misspelling a Domain

Back in the glory days of the late 1990's when I was working for a large Law Firm, the web designers had responsibility for the registration of domain names on behalf of
a major client, during which the client asked him to register AttorneyCentral.com (or so he thought!). The staffer did a check and was delighted to see the domain available. He made the purchase and proudly emailed the client.

An hour later his boss called him in to his office to say that he'd had a call from a very frustrated client who *actually* wanted him to register Attorneysatlawcentral.com. Needless to say the desired domain wasn't available and the whole office dined on his mistake for months.

9) Letting the Domain Name Expire

Now what type of company would allow their domain to expire a month after site launch? A very large one, that's who. I'll save the company some embarrassment and won't reveal their name but the site was offline for a total of 2 days while they
scrambled to pay their registrar, sort out DNS propagation and cover their tails.

8) Flashing your Cyber Underpants

One of the most common web site management platforms provided by hosting companies used to store the site statistics in a common folder called /statistics/. You could password protect this folder, but the default was to leave it open to the public and so many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet, open to any person who knew where to look.

I learned this the hard way in a public forum from a member who said he had just reviewed my traffic for the previous month and was very impressed. Publishing site statistics for all the world to see is what I call flashing your cyber underpants and I've

7) Publishing Sensitive Company Information

Quite a few companies have been guilty of doing this, including AOL, who published a search data report (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal) in 2006 that contained the private details of thousands of AOL customers. Although the report was taken offline within a few days, it had already been mirrored and distributed across the Internet. The fallout eventually led to the resignation of AOL's Chief Technical Officer.

Although not quite as serious, an ex-client of mine once published a page that had notes on it from the Sales Manager about the best way to strong-arm a customer into purchasing a higher-ticket item. Apparently the web designer didn't realize the hand-written post-it notes were not part of the web page copy. Duh!

6) Using an Insulting 404 Error Page

I clash with the web design team of one of my clients on a regular basis. Earlier this year, my client completely re-designed their web site and so I recommended they ask their web design team to design a custom 404 error page in case visitors navigated to a page on the old site that no longer existed.

Their web design team put up a message that read:

"404 Error. You've obviously typed in the wrong URL. Either that or the page you are looking for no longer exists."

That was it! No apology for the missing page, no recommendation to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just an insulting message that accuses the visitor of being an idiot.Persons viewing that page would be clicking the "back" button as fast as they could.

5) Taking a Site Offline for Maintenance

I find it fascinating that very large sites run by intelligent people still get taken offline for maintenance on a regular basis. Search engines don't understand the "Back in 15
minutes" sign and the longer the site is down, the bigger the risk.

If search bots try and index a site while it is down, they will most likely assume the previously indexed pages have expired and remove them from the search index. This means that all your hard-earned rankings could be flushed down the toilet until search engines can successfully re-index your site. Surely a mirror site for maintenance periods isn't that difficult to set up?

4) Buying a Dot Biz When the Dot Com Was Available

Ok, I'm putting up my hand on this one. I'm not going to reveal the domain but yes, I registered a dot biz domain back in 2000 when the dot com was actually available. The dot com version of my domain was bought by Yahoo a short time later and turned into a product site. Ack! My excuse is that, at the time,dot biz sites were rumored to be the next big thing and all companies were being urged to choose them over dot coms. Ok, I was wrong!

3) Allowing a Customer Complaint to Remain on a Site for 12 Months

When I was working as a public relations consultant, I was given the responsibility of re-writing the web copy of a large real estate client. One of the areas I was asked to re-write was the welcome paragraph on the Customer Feedback page where existing customers of the estate agent chain could login and leave comments about their experience.

While writing the copy, I scanned some of the customer feedback and came across an aggressive message left 12 months earlier by an obviously unhappy customer. She had used some of the most colorful language I've ever seen (and some that I hadn't) and very detailed descriptions of how she was going to take her revenge on the company for allegedly allowing a tenant to destroy her house. Nobody in charge of the web site had even noticed the comment and I still wonder how many potential customers would have been put off from using the estate agent after reading it.

2) Switching a Web Site Off for a 3 Week Christmas Vacation.

Yes, many moons ago, an ex-client of mine decided to take her entire web site offline (without telling me!) while she was on a 3 week vacation over Christmas. Only a month earlier, she had paid me $5,000 to optimize it for search engines.

It had just achieved some impressive top 10 results and all the carefully optimized pages were attracting good traffic when she shut it down and replaced the entire site with a 1 page sign that said "closed until after Christmas". I noticed the traffic and search ranking declines in her stats and was completely flabbergasted when I found the site gone. Her response when I confronted her? "Why didn't you TELL ME this could happen?"

And the dumbest web site decision I've ever witnessed?

1) Promoting a Domain Name You Don't Own:

My Alma Mater, the University of Newcastle, have spent thousands of dollars on television advertising here in Australia,marketing their new site for online post-graduate coursework: GradSchool Dot Com. There's only one problem. The domain for this site is actually Gradschool.com.au. They don't even own Gradschool.com!

Sadly, this glaring marketing error seems to have totally escaped them and they are happily referring to their brand as Gradschool.com on all their marketing material and throughout their .com.au domain. It's tragic to think of all the potential students typing in Gradschool.com expecting to find the University program. I see that whoever purchased Gradschool.com has slapped up some AdSense code on it so at least somebody will reap the benefits of those thousands of advertising dollars wasted by the University.

Don't let any of these web site tragedies happen to you. Make sure that your site decisions aren't in the hands of dummies!
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In China, Google enoys only a 27% market share; very much second fiddle to (Baidu) with 55%. Similarly, in Russia, Google is in third place, with Яндекс (Yandex) the clear leader. More than 50% of growth in internet users from 2007-2010 is likely to come from these huge countries. Isn't it time to consider a listing on their biggest search engines? In this article I will show you what is required to get your site crawled.

The Growth of the Internet in China & Russia
Russia is one of the world's fastest growing economies - and the most heavily populated country in Europe. Internet penetration in Russia currently stands at just 19.5% (compared to 69.9% in the United States). In China, penetration is just 10.9% (in a population more than four times the size of the US). The penetration levels in Western Europe and North America appear to have stabilised and look unlikely to grow significantly in the future. The majority of new world-wide internet users will come from India & China. The bulk of new European users will hail from Russia. A wave of change is sweeping over the net as we speak and, within 18 months, China will overtake the US as the biggest internet community online.

Are Google near the height of their powers?
The poses an interesting question; are Google in fact at their zenith? Most commentators put Google's current, underlying market share (in advanced western economies) at approximately 75%. However, what will be their global market share in five years time? Even if they grow their presence slighly in Russia and China, their overall world share will fall, simply from the law of averages. It would be most unwise, right now, to discount the growing importance of these new competitors!

Getting listed on Yandex
Yandex do not accept site submissions from sites hosted outside Russia. This does not mean, however, that domain names have to end in .ru (Russia) or .ua (Ukraine). In fact, any site with an IP address in a Russian speaking country or with pages in Russian will eventually be indexed by the search engine. Try comparing a search for "Intel" with a search for "Amazon". You will note that Intel, who have a part of their site in Russian, fair better in the results than Amazon. Have a look at this page from Ice Graphics which, unlike Amazon, manages to achieve (just) a top 10 result for the search phrase "books" on Yandex (despite being a English Language site, hosted in the US). This is due to the presence of Russian language text on the page (even text not properly tagged as Russian in HTML or Meta-Language tags).

So, the first rule to learn for Yandex is have some text in Russian for your Russian customers. Generally, it will be best to enclose any Russian language text with the correct W3C mark-up. For example, the following Russian phrase (roughly equivalent to "the early bird catches the worm") would be coded as follows:

<span lang="RU">Ранняя пташка червяка ловит</span>.
The second rule to learn is that your page will be more quickly indexed by Yandex if it is linked to by sites that are hosted in Russia. For example, Ice Graphics are linked from computerra.ru, ebdb.ru and more. Personally, I recommend clients seek listings on 5-6 quality Russia-based, bi-lingual directories. The following three sites will get you started (and come highly recommended from me):

Russia on the Net - http://www.ru/eng - PageRank 6
Tickets of Russia - http://www.ticketsofrussia.ru/russia/ - PageRank 4
Rusmarket Business Portal - http://www.rusmarket.com/ - PageRank 5 ($99pa)
 
Note that, if you need further help with your Russian SEO Campaign, Makai Studio can help, we have native speaker who can certainly help you with both translation services and Yandex search optimisation.

Getting Listed On Baidu
The first point to realise is that Baidu, unlike Google, merge their organic results with paid results from their paid listings service. As such, the quickest way to achieve a top ranking on Baidu is to participate in their paid service. As there is not (yet) an English-language Baidu Ads Interface, the best way to achieve this is to use an agent.

To rank well organically, you must first realise that the Chinese search audience is very sino-centric. Your target landing page must be fully in Chinese and presented in the Chinese style. This, inevitably, means using the services of a Chinese translator (and quite possibly a web designer too). Note that, whilst traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Simplified Chinese will be sufficient to serve all markets. The entire web page should be encoded using a Simplified Chinese language declaration in the meta-data of the page:

Between the <HEAD> tags:
<META http-equiv="Content-Language" content="zh-CN">
You may find some guidance on the web suggesting the use of "zh-Hant", which is the correct mark-up for Simplified Chinese. However, I would stick with zh-CN for now as it is supported by a wider range of web applications. When ready, you can submit your site to Baidu from the following page:

Baidu URL Submission Page - http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html
Note that Baidu do not guarantee your site will be crawled and your site should comply with their listing guidelines.
 Once listed on Baidu, you can improve your position by sourcing high-quality inbound links from Chinese directories. Many of the best directories (to target) are those based in Taiwan and Hong Kong (where internet penetration has been higher for longer). To get started, try the following three:
Cooperative Directory - http://www.webdirectory.com.tw/ - PageRank 4
Taiwan Directory - http://www.taiwandirectory.com/tw - PageRank 4
Web Guide Hong Kong - http://www.index.webstudio.com.hk/ - PageRank 3
Good luck with the campaign and give us a shout if you need some help. 
Conclusions
Remember, time and tide waits for no man and the early bird catches the worm (Ранняя пташка червяка ловит) so get cracking on Yandex and Baidu before your competitors do!

 Other sites of interest: http://www.makaistudio.com 

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1. Regularly updated, useful
    content

2. Submit your site to reputable
    directories

3. Get people to link to you

4. Stay on topic

5. Send out press releases

6. Test, wait, measure

7. Add ALT tags to images

8. Create link bait

9. Pay careful attention to
    keyword density

10. Think quality links, not
     quantity

11. Create title tags with your
     search terms

Nothing beats getting the word out via email, on the street, snail mail, and these days, of course, online communities. If applying brick-and-mortar world ideas online, then you should arrive at the creation of link bait – something so compelling people won't be able to help but link to you.

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz supplies a nice sample list of things that can work as link bait in his Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization. They include things like offering free tools, Web 2.0 applications, top 10 lists, industry-related humor, event reviews, interviews, surveys, data, contests and giveaways, and, of course, expert advice.

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